Tag: Washington Post

The argument about Obamacare is often framed as a moral issue. It’s the caring and compassionate against the cruel and heartless. That’s the rhetoric; the reality is different. Many of us who oppose Obamacare don’t do so because we enjoy seeing people suffer. We believe that, in an ideal world, everyone would have insurance. But we also think that Obamacare has huge drawbacks that outweigh its plausible benefits.

It creates powerful pressures against companies hiring full-time workers — precisely the wrong approach after the worst economic slump since the Depression. There will be more bewildering regulations, more regulatory uncertainties, more unintended side effects and more disappointments. A costly and opaque system will become more so.

I blogged previously about Mitt Romney’s claim that ObamaCare creates “an unelected board that’s going to tell people ultimately what kind of treatments they can have.” President Obama conceded the point when he responded that the Independent Payment Advisory Board “basically identifies best practices and says, let’s use the purchasing power of Medicare and Medicaid to help to institutionalize all these good things that we do.” The president admitted the whole point of IPAB is to let a bunch of experts decide what practices are “best,” and to stop paying for what isn’t.

This is a myth advanced repeatedly by critics of the Affordable Care Act and debunked consistently by independent fact-checkers…the panel is explicitly prohibited from cutting benefits for people on Medicare. And there is no provision in the law that empowers the advisory board to make any decisions about what treatments doctors may provide for their patients.

The media “fact check” business is incredibly tiresome given how pedantic and downright inaccurate it is, but I wanted to weigh in on this one before it hardens. The LA Times somehow thinks that the ACA (aka Obamacare) will have no effect on determining what care patients can get, and consequently dings Romney for saying it will. There isn’t a single honest health economist out there who agrees with the LA Times on this one.

Bhattacharya explains that IPAB will be able to influence care by cutting payments to providers. But that’s not the half of it. IPAB has the power to do exactly what the fact-checkers think it can’t: deny specific treatments to Medicare enrollees. It can even raise taxes and do other things the fact-checkers think it cannot.

I was traveling when the Washington Post published this article on D.C.’s efforts to implement ObamaCare:

If you want to know what health reform in action looks like, here’s what you should picture: a nondescript conference room, on the fourth floor of a government building, with about four dozen people sitting in rows of red chairs and one fluorescent light that keeps flickering on and off…

[T]his is actually a pretty important place. It’s where government officials decide what the Obama administration’s signature legislative achievement will look like for residents of the nation’s capitol…

It started with the first agenda item: Deciding what set of essential health benefits the District of Columbia will require all insurance carriers to cover. Even in one of the most Democratic-leaning districts in the country, there’s was not exactly enthusiasm for this new piece of federal regulation.

“This is mandated by the law,” District of Columbia insurance commissioner Bill White noted. “This is not something anyone here decided to do.”

Still, they did have to set an essential benefit package…

That sounds like to me like bureaucratic hell in action more than health care reform in action. And the last part, about ObamaCare or federal bureaucrats requiring D.C. to make these decisions, isn’t even true.

One consolation is that it looks like not even the 14 states that want to establish ObamaCare’s health insurance Exchanges will be able to do so on time.

Even with widespread support, the District still has a to-do list that stretches 11 PowerPoint slides long…

All of it is supposed to be done by Jan. 1, 2013, but officials here recognize, despite their commitment, it’s just not possible. Even the most stalwart of Obamacare supporters just simply have too much work to meet that deadline…

“No state is going to be able to be fully certified on Jan. 1,” said Bonnie Norton, D.C’s acting director of health reform.. “When they passed the ACA, they were highly optimistic about the timeline for states to implement exchanges.”

Does anyone really think that ObamaCare’s Exchanges will be up an running on time by October 1, 2013?

Why am I only hearing about President Obama’s gob-smacking “I haven’t raised taxes” claim today, and from Reason?

On CBS News’s “60 Minutes” Sunday night, President Obama said, “Taxes are lower on families than they’ve been probably in the last 50 years. So I haven’t raised taxes.”

As of Monday morning, neither the Washington Post’s Pinocchio-awarding Fact-Checker, nor the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org, nor the Tampa Bay Times’ Pulitzer-Prize-winning Politifact.com had risen to this opportunity…

Unbelievable. I just checked those websites, and they still haven’t.

Fortunately, Ira Stoll has. He leaves out a number of taxes President Obama has enacted, though, including raising the Medicare payroll tax on high-income earners, applying the Medicare payroll tax to non-payroll income for high-income earners, limiting the tax exclusion for flexible spending accounts, increasing the penalties on certain health savings account withdrawals, the “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health plans…

[I]ncreases in the price of what the federal government buys relative to what the private sector buys will inevitably raise the cost of state involvement in the economy. Since the early 1980s the price of hospital care and higher education has risen fivefold relative to the price of cars and clothing, and more than a hundredfold relative to the price of televisions.

Perhaps the lesson to be drawn is that government should buy less stuff? Maybe then prices in the health and education sectors would behave like the prices for cars, clothing, and televisions.

Then there’s the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), a body of 15 experts charged with limiting Medicare spending if it passes certain targets. But the law handcuffs IPAB. It can’t increase patient cost-sharing, restrict benefits, modify eligibility requirements or — in any one year — cut spending by more than 1.5 percent, reports the Kaiser Family Foundation.

All four of those assertions about supposed limitations on IPAB’s powers are false, as Diane Cohen and I explain here.

The Supreme Court may have declared that the government can order Americans to get health insurance, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to sign up.

Nowhere is that more evident than Oklahoma, a conservative state with an independent streak and a disdain for the strong arm of government…

When it comes to health insurance, the effort to sign people up isn’t likely to get much help from the state. Antipathy toward President Obama’s signature health-care overhaul runs so deep that when the federal government awarded Oklahoma a large grant to plan for the new law, the governor turned away the money — all $54 million of it.

The idea that the federal government will persuade reluctant people here to get insurance elicited head-shaking chuckles at Cattlemen’s Steakhouse…

But some in Oklahoma aren’t so sure the population here will be easy to persuade, especially if the state government continues to condemn “Obamacare.”

“If we’re not being cooperative and all the rhetoric is hostile, then that’s going to be a real barrier to providing information to people,” said David Blatt, director of the Oklahoma Policy Institute, a state policy think tank. “There’s a lot of important outreach that needs to happen before January 1, 2014, and it’s going to be extremely difficult to do that when you have state leaders standing there saying, ‘Over our dead bodies.’ ”

Resistance remains strong in other states as well, with some governors promising to opt out of parts of the law.